Discuss about the Security and Privacy of Facebook User.
Facebook is world’s largest social networking site. Social networking sites are the network to build up communication and relationship among the people all around the world using internet. It is a faster method than face to face communication and provides a larger area of communication (Brenner & Smith, 2013). Social networks can be classified into several categories like personal, location, content sharing and other networks (Brenner and Smith, 2013). This classification depends on the purpose of the network as well as the information which are being shared by that network. Facebook is a social networking site, founded by Mark Zuckerberg, which allows users profile creating, photos and videos and audio uploading, chatting and others. Features involved with Facebook are pages, events, group and many others (Krasnova, Veltri & Günther, 2012).
The report is associated with the privacy that is associated with social networking sites, especially with Facebook. A networking site that is associated with sharing user information is always vulnerable as the information becomes available to everyone. Personal information which are being shared in the Facebook can easily be downloaded without proper privacy setting and that can further trouble the owner of the information.
Aim of the report is to study a case related with the vulnerabilities and problems related with policies of Facebook regarding user privacy. The allegations of Federal Trade Commission against Facebook’s policies and other problems developing in other parts of the world due to this are mentioned in the case study.
Social networking sites provide the platform to share personal information like data, photos, videos, audio, status update and others (Acquisti, Brandimarte & Loewenstein, 2015). The information becomes available to all the users or selective users according to the user privacy policies of the social networking sites. Information can become publicly available. Sometimes the setting option for information sharing remains public and the information become visible to all the user of the networking site (Smith et al., 2012). Sometimes the social networking site does not contain certain privacy option that restricts the entire user to view some information except the allowed ones. Sometimes interventions of third party software become the reason for the breach in privacy settings (Young & Quan-Haase, 2013). Several times it has been seen that social networking sites do not give effective guarantee to protect the user information accordingly. Electronic tracking through short strings of text has been proved to be a dangerous medium of tracking information. A study performed by AT&T labs had showed that information can be gathered by advertisers and other third parties from the social networking sites from the help of cookies and can use them to build a profile of user’s life (Tucker, 2014).
Information those are gathered from the social networking sites are used both for legal and illegal purposes. Third party software developers and business users use the information to personalize applications like online games and others and to build up a successful advertise. Their market research becomes easy for them. However, in most of the cases information are used in illegal ways by cyber criminals and identity thieves.
Facebook provides the biggest platform for online social networking and communication. More than 2 billion people remain active daily in Facebook. Numerous photos, videos, status updates are posted daily in Facebook. The incident that brought out the problems as major perspective is the leakage of the photo of Randi Zuckerberg, a former senior executive and the sister of Mark Zuckerberg. The photo had been posted to friends by Randi; however it had been downloaded and posted in Twitter. The person, who had been accused primarily for posting was Callie Schweitzer, marketing director of VOX media. This problem had occurred after 11 days of the release of new privacy control settings by Facebook. Prior to that, privacy control settings are less secure and lengthy. Users have to open a different page to open the privacy control setting. New settings had provided the option in the same page as ‘who can see my stuff’ option. Each post is made customizable with this option so user does not have any difficulty in securing every post (Wang et al., 2013). Despite of these measures information had been leaked, which proved the inefficiency of the privacy control system.
Data policy of Facebook was not accurate as per their demands. The incident of Randi Zuckerberg brought out the issues in privacy control systems. Federal Trade Commission is the government association of United States of America which protect consumer rights and information. Fundamental mission of this organisation is to investigate the businesses incorporated with public information and protect the information and also take necessary protective measures if any illegal activities are found. In the late 2011, the organisation had filed a suit which had accused Facebook for deceiving the customers and not following their policies accurately. Many third party applications are associated with Facebook, which are related to gaming, advertising, online quiz and many more (Gundecha, & Liu, 2012). According to the data policies of Facebook user information like name, gender, profile pictures, status updates and others. Being an advertising company, the selling of advertisements depends on the demographic information gathered by Facebook and according to its terms and conditions Facebook has the rights to use the information of the users (Madejski, Johnson & Bellovin, 2012). Apart from that, Facebook had announced that it will not share the sensitive user information with the advertisers, only the information those are necessary and expandable will be only be shared with third party applications.
Investigation of Federal Trade Commission found that the claims of Facebook of securing user information are not correct. Much sensitive information had been shared to the third party application and there had been many complaints against that. Another investigation had reflected the partnership between Facebook and Datalogix, which was a credit card purchasing information collecting company (Reynolds, 2015). The investigation had revealed that the user information of Facebook was getting involved in the advertising research of Datalogix, without consent or knowledge of the specific user. Additionally, a user was not provided to clear his or her information from the research of Datalogix from Facebook. It could only be done from the homepage of Datalogix.
Additional problems had also been arisen with the subsidiaries of Facebook. In Decmber 2012, one of the acquired applications of Facebook, Instagram had announced that all the photos, updated in Instagram can be sold to the third parties without any compensation to the users as per the new privacy notice. Furthermore, the owner had also informed the metadata associated with the photos like name, gender, email id of the users will also be subjected to sell and the users disagreeing with the plans are given a few weeks’ notice to remove their account from Instagram. These policies had created severe discontent among the users and affected the reputation of Instagram as well as Facebook.
Leakage of information can be placed under the faults of organisation or the user. The case study highlights the areas regarding issues in privacy policies. Facebook had owned a specific privacy policy from the start of the business. It had prepared a privacy system to protect the user information. Despite of being involved in advertising business, the organisation had claimed that sensitive user information will not be used to third parties (Xu, Michael & Chen, 2013). The incident of leaking of photo of Randy Zuckerberg was an example of the faults of Facebook regarding privacy issues. The agenda of a newly customized and more user-friendly privacy system is not only to enhance the privacy policies of the company but also to secure the user information more strongly, in a methodical way (Vitak, 2012). The incident happened just after the customization of the privacy system, which showed that the system had not been checked properly before launching. Majority of the reasons regarding privacy issues had lied with Facebook, as the investigations of Federal Trade Commission had revealed that Facebook was not following the policies. Sensitive private information like name, age, photos were getting integrated with third party applications (Reynolds, 2011). As a result, private information of consumers were becoming vulnerable and easily accessible to cyber criminals (Litt, 2013). The example of Randy Zuckerberg gives a clear picture to that, though it was not a criminal act.
However, a little part of privacy policy integrates the user as well. Any information that is too sensitive for a user should not be shared in a social networking site that contains the access of more than a million users (Tan et al., 2012). Understanding of the privacy policies is very important for a user as without fully knowing the terms and conditions, a user cannot blame directly for the faults or leakage of information.
Privacy policy is one of the major components in the business of a social networking site. Social networking sites are the primary platform of online communication now-a-days. Users always tend to find innovative but safe social networking sites, which will provide them with new innovative options for social networking as well as keep their information protected from the third parties (Liang et al., 2014). The customization of information sharing is the new idea of Facebook for customer satisfaction. Reveal of user information to third party will definitely demoralise the user and he or she will fell that it is risky to use the site further. Therefore, introduction of new policies to protect user privacy is a compulsory matter for Facebook.
The additional measurements, which are mandatory to improve the privacy settings for the users should be primarily integrate with the social networking sites. Facebook should develop an option where privacy can be customized to the specific people those one user wants and the information should be protected that no other user can download the information (Nilizadeh et al., 2012). Personal information like photos and videos can be guarded using different techniques. A new system has been launched by Facebook which is profile picture guard so that no one can download the profile picture that one has set (Stutzman, Gross & Acquisti, 2013). This option is innovative but not highly effective as once a person change the profile picture the guard gets automatically turned off. This feature should be customized more accurately. Downloading of pictures should be confined among those who have been shared with. This protective option should be added with videos also. Another privacy option that should be mentioned here is the tagging information (Wilson, Gosling & Graham, 2012). Many times it has been seen that users get tagged in different unknown information. Facebook has the option for removing of tags but the users should get tagged in the 1st place. Therefore, tagging option needs to be customized in such a way that a user tag an unknown person.
A privacy issue had happened with me some time ago which had led me to stop using Facebook. The issue was very severe to me. At that point anybody was able to download the profile picture of somebody and the personal information can be easily viewed. My profile picture had been downloaded by some anonymous user and some of my personal data had been gathered. After that I had watched that a fake profile had been created using those information and the profile had been used to disturb some other profiles in Facebook. Even my email id had been leaked so I was getting a good amount of spam mails. This was the issue for which I have stopped using Facebook as the information were protected very poorly.
Conclusion:
From the above report, it can be concluded that, user privacy is one of the major concerns of social networking sites. Social networking is an activity based on communication and sharing information that may be personal or professional. Users of these sites will always prefer that their information must be confined within their communication group and leakage of information will result a huge dissatisfaction among the users. Leakage of information always harm a user and it will definitely affect the reputation and publicity of the social networking sites. Therefore, a social networking sites must have a good set of privacy policy and appropriate system or systems integrated with the social networking sites to protect the information of their users from wrong hands.
Main objective of recommendation is to protect the confidential information of the users from falling into wrong hands. To protect the information login approvals must be protected with efficient authentication process. Facebook has newly launched the ‘two-factor authentication’ protocol for this matter. This authentication protocol must be backed up properly so that in no other way any other person can hack into one’s profile. These privacy systems must be properly maintained. New systems should be launched after checking properly. The lesson can be learned from the case of Randy Zuckerberg, that in spite of presence of user privacy system the photos of her had been leaked to Twitter by a person who was not a part of the sharing group. New options should be innovated by the programmers of the organisation within a short interval of time so that the old users remain happy and the new users become more attracted towards social networking. The design of the security option can be more stylish. Demographic information should be protected in a different manner and under no circumstances should be released to a third party. Third party applications should be permitted if they agree legally not to use any information.
References:
Acquisti, A., Brandimarte, L., & Loewenstein, G. (2015). Privacy and human behavior in the age of information. Science, 347(6221), 509-514.
Brenner, J., & Smith, A. (2013). 72% of online adults are social networking site users. Washington, DC: Pew Internet & American Life Project.Braun, M.T., 2013. Obstacles to social networking website use among older adults. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(3), pp.673-680.
Gundecha, P., & Liu, H. (2012). Mining social media: a brief introduction. In New Directions in Informatics, Optimization, Logistics, and Production (pp. 1-17). Informs.
Krasnova, H., Veltri, N. F., & Günther, O. (2012). Self-disclosure and privacy calculus on social networking sites: The role of culture. Business & Information Systems Engineering, 4(3), 127-135.
Liang, X., Zhang, K., Shen, X., & Lin, X. (2014). Security and privacy in mobile social networks: challenges and solutions. IEEE Wireless Communications, 21(1), 33-41.
Litt, E. (2013). Understanding social network site users’ privacy tool use. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(4), 1649-1656.
Madejski, M., Johnson, M., & Bellovin, S. M. (2012, March). A study of privacy settings errors in an online social network. In Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops (PERCOM Workshops), 2012 IEEE International Conference on(pp. 340-345). IEEE.
Nilizadeh, S., Jahid, S., Mittal, P., Borisov, N., & Kapadia, A. (2012, December). Cachet: a decentralized architecture for privacy preserving social networking with caching. In Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Emerging networking experiments and technologies (pp. 337-348). ACM.
Reynolds, G. (2011). Ethics in information technology. Cengage learning.
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Stutzman, F., Gross, R., & Acquisti, A. (2013). Silent listeners: The evolution of privacy and disclosure on facebook. Journal of privacy and confidentiality, 4(2), 2.
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